Sundown[ing]
Jillee Sexton
__________
For the past five years, I’ve woken up at exactly 6 p.m. and consumed two pints of blood from the industrial fridge that sits in the equally industrial kitchen of the house that’s supposed to be mine. The blood is colder than ice every time it touches my lips and I inevitably spit a mouthful into the sink in reaction. That’s as consistent as the fact that it tastes fucking terrible.
Whoever romanticized having to drink blood and sleep all day should have their head examined. I’ve never looked or felt this close to death. Giovanni, my therapist, thinks I’m on the verge of a mid-life crisis. His name isn’t really Giovanni and he’s not Italian. He’s from some town in Illinois and his real name is Larry but I guess no one wants to pay $100 an hour for someone named Larry to listen to them rant. His accent isn’t as bad as it used to be anyway—and I understand better than most how much he needs to believe that Larry doesn’t exist.
He doesn’t blink an eye when I tell him I want to drink from the source. He’s like me, so there’s no danger to him if I lose it in that tiny, olive-colored room that reminds me of the inside of a grape. I wish someone would take their giant fist and squish us right into oblivion sometimes when I’m lying on that stupidly uncomfortable, hideous couch and bemoaning my life choices.
I was married once, now blessedly divorced. My ex’s name was Morris and he was the real anti-Christ. Giovanni thinks that I’ve focused all my anger at my current situation onto Morris, who I haven’t seen for…oh, a while—but he’s wrong. Morris wasn’t around, but I only talk about him because there’s nothing else to talk about. I resent that I’m left lying on this couch and complaining about stupid fucking Morris and his stupid fucking Mustang.
“I’d definitely eat him if I saw him now.” I think of his skin against mine, rubbing, friction. I think of blood, pink stains. I think of him looking at me, especially the last time, and I dig crescents into my fists.
“Why do you think you feel that way?” Giovanni asks, not looking up from his phone. He’s playing Tetris and I hope he loses big.
“Because I hate him,” I say, knowing it’s a lie. I just need someone to hate. “Do you think I should get married again?”
“Do you want to get married?”
“No. It’s so much work. And if it goes badly again I really might eat whoever I marry.”
“So marry someone like us.”
I think about it. Giovanni is the only one I talk to who has this problem, those of us forced to invert our daily schedules and skulk around when the sun isn’t out. I don’t want to marry him. He doesn’t want to marry me.
“Then I would have to share my blood.”
Giovanni says nothing, merely holding up a heart-shaped sign that he saves for such occasions that says, ‘sharing is caring.’
“Didn’t I say not to show me that sign again?” I bare my teeth, hiss a little.
“You need to learn to control your anger.” He fans the sign at me. “Think about something calming.”
I think about the look on Morris’s face when I smacked him with the divorce papers. “I feel better.”
“Good session, B,” Giovanni says, which is always the cue to leave. “Try not to kill anyone.” I take my time picking myself up off the couch and making my way to the door. Giovanni never looks up from his phone but I catch a glimpse of his screen. Level up. That fucker.
At least, I think that’s how it went. But I’ve seen Giovanni’s notes: still exhibiting signs of dramatic behavior, prone to exaggeration.
Maybe I wouldn’t make up stories if he was just honest with me for once.
»
I hate uncertainty, but it’s in my veins at this point. Like the glimmer of anxiety that accompanies the doorbell ringing once every other day. It’s always the same person—Cindy, my aunt and the only family I have—and she always has a bag of things I don’t want.
“I’m running late,” she says, setting her bag on the kitchen island. She takes out cartons, fruits, other things—nothing I eat. “Make sure you drink all this. They had the right one this time.”
I examine the container. It looks like tomato juice but I know it isn’t. “I hate the taste of blood.” Acidic, heavy, drowning. It lingers in my mouth for hours, sometimes days.
Cindy is still sorting groceries, placing them in my fridge. “I’ll be back in two days to check on you.” She moves to the cabinet next to the fridge, takes out a small bottle. I stay quiet as she opens it and empties a few pills into her hand. “You didn’t take one.”
“I took it.” A lie, but it’s just a vitamin. I never understood why Cindy’s so obsessed with me taking those stupid pills. Giovanni’s the one who told me I should take them, so I did. He takes them too—maybe, I can’t remember.
I watch her in the long mirror above the table, see our reflections—I don’t know why I have one—a woman with dark hair and another just beginning to go gray. I open my mouth, touch my canines, pressing my fingers as far as I can into them until it hurts. I feel Cindy looking at me but I don’t look back. She doesn’t like what I am now, but she forces herself to make peace with it.
Before she goes, she touches my cheek, pats my head. I’m sitting on the couch, a thin blanket pulled up around my knees. I feel so tired. I don’t like to be awake before five. I think she tells me she loves me before the door closes, the lock clicks. I seek out something calming. The picture on my TV screen is like one of those lava lamps from when I was a kid—the good old days, I guess. The globs are neon green, drifting and eating each other. I imagine them floating in a womb, waiting to be born, suspended indefinitely.
»
Time passes. I meet Giovanni three times a week. I see Cindy the other four. She always asks me about the sessions, tells me to take the vitamins.
Sometimes I feel like a different person for each day.
“How long have I been like this again?” I ask Giovanni. My hand is suspended above my head, and it seems thinner than before. The skin is the color of blank, bleached paper. There are fine lines there, little crags and craters in the surface. It doesn’t feel like mine.
“It’s been five months since we started meeting.” He’s not playing Tetris lately. Maybe he didn’t do that as much as I thought. “How are you feeling?”
“Fuck.” It used to be my favorite word. It’s the only one that comes to mind now. “I have no idea.”
“You should go outside and get some air every now and then.”
“It’s harder to do that at night.”
Giovanni is writing in his notebook. His face is turned away. “Try to expand what you think you can do.”
“Do you do that?”
“I go out all the time. Walking or biking is good for your muscles.”
My muscles are long gone. I tell him this. He scribbles more.
“Where are you with anger?”
“4.” I’m too tired to be angry all the time.
The books on the shelf behind him are different now. It used to be a mix of novels and self-help books, but now it’s mostly the latter. “You got rid of the books.”
“I donated them to a library.”
I used to read one when I first started coming here. It was an old book, a paperback novel of a classic I think. I can’t even remember what it was about. Letters from a guy or to a guy. I think his name was Jonathan.
“Did Jonathan get what he wanted?”
“He did,” Giovanni says. “It all worked out in the end.”
The notebook closes. I go home, shielding my face from the dying rays of the sun as I get into the car. I can drive; Cindy thinks I shouldn’t.
But I’m awake and Cindy doesn’t get to decide everything.
»
I start keeping a journal—mostly a dream journal. Giovanni says it will help me remember things. And I make it work by pretending I’m Jonathan, off on some grand adventure and writing letters to the people waiting for me, not stuck here in this mausoleum of hours with only two people that ever speak to me—one paid, the other obligated.
It might seem ideal, and I know. I know what it isn’t, what I’m not. Like how I wasn’t always this angry. I used to never curse. I was quiet, meek, polite. I did everything the way I was supposed to. I went to college, got a good job, got married, and attempted to live the way everyone else seemed to think I should. Now there are too many times where I blast Lana Del
Rey from the speakers and apply too much eye makeup, or I drag myself dramatically out into the backyard under a full moon and lounge in the grass, letting bugs crawl over my legs, between my fingers. I imagine I’m underground, lying stiller than I’ll ever be in my life. I imagine being told I’m chasing the aesthetic, I’m putting on an act, I’m being dramatic. I couldn’t say what’s true or not. But I get breathless at the thought of enclosed space. No, not breathless. It’s like wheezing, an act of doing something I can only sort of remember. It used to be natural, but now it’s pretending. I pretend a lot. I stuff cheap powdered donuts down my throat and in an hour they’re coming out the same way as pink bile. I don’t shit, I just piss…I think. I think that’s how it goes.
I can still sleep, so I try lucid dreaming. I pinch myself. I write in my dream journal about all the times I’ve been swimming in a lake and drowned, or barreling through a tangled maze, lying in sand and waiting for the sun to sear me right out of existence, sitting by a toilet with a puddle of blood, or in a hospital, my brain on a screen, dissected. I ask myself, ‘am I dreaming?’ even during the hours I’m locked in the office with Giovanni, counting the ceiling tiles, wishing there was something I actually wanted to do. I mostly wonder why it’s so easy to hate the things I used to love.
I watch the news—sigh. I watch soaps, hardcore dramas, sitcoms—boring, stale. I go through my collection of possessions and ask myself if they bring me joy, then replace everything because I can’t be bothered to do anything with it. Then I contemplate setting the house on fire while I’m still in it, thinking almost fondly of childhood dreams of dying valiantly or some bullshit. Except, there’s nothing [allegedly] valiant about arson. Where is the villain to smite in this scenario?
I imagine what it would look like, and when I lucid dream, I walk by the charred husk of what once was my little slice of the cul-de-sac. I’d bought it with Morris. Or maybe that wasn’t right. I could have done it alone. Who knows. I burned it down alone in the dream. I took a match and set it to the upholstered seats of the Mustang sitting in the garage. It burned for hours. In my dream, the block is deserted. All the people, the white noise—gone. I can’t tell if I like it or not. The ash smells bad, reminding me of my cremated grandmother whose remains are displayed on my mantel. I worry about where she’ll go one day, who will take care of her, if she’ll end up on a shelf at a Goodwill, her ashes mistaken for dust and discarded in a wastebin, a $5 tag on her urn.
I could be like that if I stood outside and waited for the sun to rise. I wouldn’t die right away. It would be like a really bad, gradual sunburn, slowly peeling away layers of skin until it got to the muscles, then the bones. Ash comes last, and it never leaves.
»
Cindy tries to do Giovanni’s job sometimes, making us tea, luring me out to the rickety iron table on the back patio. She drinks her brew—Earl Grey, while I stare at mine. The smell tickles my nose. I sneeze.
“Bless you.” She sips from the delicate teacup, leaning back in her chair, making it screech against the concrete. I wince and cover my ears.
“Sorry.” She sets the cup down. I don’t even recognize it—but it’s from a set I apparently own, soft white with blush pink petals. Must have been a gift.
“We need to talk about what happened last week.”
I push my cup away, cross my arms, stare fixedly at the lone tree in the backyard. It’s a plum tree, and like all the trees in this neighborhood, it looks like one bad storm would kill it in an instant.
“The tree is blooming,” I note.
“Are you going to pretend not to remember?”
“I don’t remember.” It’s true. Well, probably. A fallen blossom drifts to my feet and I pick it up, twisting it in my hands.
“You drove the car into a stop sign.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened.” There was a dent in the car, but it was always there. “When did we plant that tree?” I imagine the taste of the fruit it will bear and my mouth waters a little. I hate that I can’t have it.
“Don’t change the subject. You’re lucky you didn’t hurt yourself. I put the keys away. We’re not taking any chances.”
I roll my eyes. I could scream and yell and argue, but I know that ‘away’ just means the safe, and I know the combination. It’s my house, my car. She can’t keep me from doing what I want. Let her try.
“I wish we could talk like we used to.”
“Aren’t we talking now?”
“It’s not the same,” she says, not looking at me. I don’t know if I respond, but somehow, I know what she means. In that distant part of me, I know.
»
It’s another night with Lana, but a quiet one, moving around the house in a daze, examining dust-covered rooms, one maroon for the years of marriage, another chalked blue for nights when the
couch isn’t enough, and a pastel circular never slept in. In each are items I can’t remember buying. Maybe they were all gifts since I used to be popular. I walk past old pictures of people I mostly remember, like Morris, and me—looking different, my face fuller. I’m smiling in that one, but I don’t remember it. Cindy’s there too, hugging me, laughing. She calls me but I don’t answer. If she asks, I’ll say I was asleep. I’m tired anyway, crawling onto the couch with my blanket and listening to Lana sing about how sad she is. I’m not even sure if it really is Lana. Just some woman with a quiet, deep voice, a cave I can crawl into and hibernate.
The lucid dream that night is me walking through an empty building. It’s a skyscraper, windows everywhere. I’m on the top floor, looking out on a city. In the distance, I see something coming closer. It’s a plane, a bird. A giant bird, flying through the sky. It flies right past the windows, its disc of an eye mirroring the sun. The building starts to crumble and I fade into a new reality. The edge of a lake, a man that looks like Morris standing there, his hand open. I want to take it. I fall against him. There’s blood but I don’t know where it comes from. I think it’s me. It’s both of us. I don’t know if we’re dead or alive. A plane passes over us, shaking the ground. I rattle like a doll.
I could change things, but I don’t. I let this one settle in.
»
The one thing I’ve always been sure of is that it wasn’t always like this—I inscribe those words again and again in my head, and then, at a desk I only ever used twice, I write the letter I never could, the words flowing freely across my mind, unraveling in ink. I stole some of them from Mina, who Jonathan loved. I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air. I don’t know what they mean, but more than anything I wish they were meant for me. I read them to Cindy, who smiles and nods like she
knows. She doesn’t. I give her the letter with no address. She says she’ll send it, but two days later I find it crumpled in her purse. I plan to confront her eventually. A week ago I wouldn’t have waited.
Oh, that’s right. Last week she came over with a suitcase and she hasn’t left since. She makes me take the vitamins twice daily while she watches. Whatever. They don’t taste that bad. I drink the blood straight from the container, then gag. Cindy pats my back. She tries to get me to eat some grapes. I can’t so I lie on the couch again. Giovanni comes to my house while Cindy waits in the kitchen. He asks me how I’m feeling but I don’t know.
“You need to eat something.”
“I can’t.”
“Look.” He takes a grape and pops it in his mouth, chews. I see juice dribbling down his chin. “It’s really good, B.”
“How can you do that? What about the blood?”
His eyes are calm as he removes his glasses. I stare at him as he folds his hands over his lap and meets my eye. I waver on the precipice, knowing what he wants to say, sensing that he won’t. He turns, and Cindy comes, handing him a glass of blood. He drinks it slowly, and I watch, covering my mouth, wanting it but hating it.
When the glass is empty, his lips purse, but he doesn’t gag. Stone-faced, Cindy takes it back.
»
My letter is moved to the safe along with the keys. I open it after Cindy’s fallen asleep on the couch and take them out. If she hears the Mustang start, I don’t care. The letter is resting in the passenger seat, and I drive myself in the dark to the po
staring at the blank front. I don’t know where it’s going. But I need to send it. I need someone to see it. I flick it in, watch it drop, hear the faint thump as it hits the bottom. Someone will open the bin tomorrow and notice the wrinkled white envelope. Maybe they would throw it away. Maybe they would read it, place it under their pillow, wonder what it means, let it drive them a little mad.
There are people standing on some of the streetcorners. One looks like my grandmother, another like my father, my mother, Morris. Morris won’t look at me, and my hands grip the steering wheel, foot pressing harder on the accelerator. I want to yell, maybe cry, but I don’t, just watching his face, memorizing it again, the sketched lines I can see in this dark. I want to tell him to look at me, to say I’ve moved on, but I won’t. I pass him, pressing the pedal, making the engine scream.
And I think about that and the letter all night, gliding around the suburbs, letting myself compose the stories of these neighbors in the flickers I see through windows. I want to consume them as much as I don’t. There’s a memory tickling at the edge of my mind of doing this, the top down, the taste of ice cream on my tongue and fingers woven between mine. It feels like little more than another dream.
»
When I finally pull into the driveway, Cindy is outside, phone in hand, dark circles under her eyes. Did she always seem so old? Was she like this even when I was young enough to be carried in her arms?
“Where have you been?” She’s hugging me. I feel bony against her, like she’s holding bits of me together. My arms are shaking, lightly, so lightly I almost miss it. My legs are stiff. I want to lie down. She smells sweet, slightly floral. I want to press myself harder against her and
inhale, drink her blood, comfort myself with the knowledge that I’ll never change. I am this and this is me. When my teeth touch her neck, she jerks away, taking my hand and drawing me into the house, settling me on the couch with a blanket. Then she’s handing me a cup of tea and a muffin. It’s chocolate, something else I used to love.
As soon as she disappears into the kitchen again, I put it on the coffee table and pick up a book. It’s the Jonathan book, frayed and falling apart. I flip through the pages, searching for something. I don’t know what it is until I see the words: No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
Cindy comes back with another teacup, frowning at the book, at the muffin, at me. “You need to eat something, B.”
“I can’t.” We’ve been through this so many times. I hug the book to my chest. “I only drink blood.”
I freeze when the teacup in her hands hits the floor, fracturing into three pieces, bleeding its contents across the rug. She’s staring at me, and I instinctively know I’ve broken her, that I’ve won this sick game we play, the one I never agreed to, but I can’t stop. I’m too far in. The past should be dead, but Cindy won’t let it die. I know what she’ll say before it comes, but she’s wrong—about everything. Morris and I divorced five years ago because I’d become this. That was it.
“You don’t drink blood, Beatrice.”
No one’s called me that in so long for a moment it feels like she’s talking to someone else—a shadow, or a ghost. I set the book down, get up and go into the kitchen, grab a carton and drink, gagging, downing all of it slowly. It runs down my chin, my front. I don’t care.
Tears make her face shine. “Tomato juice. It’s just tomato juice.”
I throw the carton down. It splatters red across the white tiles. “Why are you doing this?” I grab my book, pointing to the cover, the man with the red eyes, the fangs. “Look, it’s just like that. Why are you lying to me? It’s been five years,” I say. “I got divorced, then—”
“There was no divorce.” I hate the sympathy in her eyes. “I know you don’t want to think about it again after your diagnosis and—”
“Stop it.” The spine of the book is digging into my skin. Jonathan. Oh, poor Jonathan. What would he say? How did he find Mina? How did he tell her what he needed to when he never had any idea what was really going on?
“Why are you doing this?” I know I’ve asked the question, but I didn’t mean to. I think I didn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t let her answer, stumbling outside, breaking away from the hands that try to stop me. I don’t have to listen to anything. Nothing’s changed. I’ll gather myself and go back, confront her later. Giovanni will tell her what he always does. He’ll be on my side because he knows how much I need this.
I stand on the edge of the drive, watching the sky gradually lighten to seashell pink, the color of the newly born, gliding over this too geometric landscape and seeping through the cracks. Jonathan’s words about the dearness of morning spring to mind, spinning around my mind in a dance. The morning has a scent, a taste. It’s fresh, faintly sweet, a plum plucked from the tree, bitten and bleeding. It stings, and it eases.
__________
Jillee Sexton is a fiction writer from Texas with an MFA from McNeese. Her work has been published in New Literati, Retreat West, and elsewhere.
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